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Effect of Excess and Deficiency of Individual Essential Amino Acids in Diets on the Liver Lipid Content of Growing Rats

Laboratory of Nutritional Biochemistry, Department of Agricultural Chemistry, Nagoya University, Chikusa, Nagoya, Japan

In an attempt to determine the effect of individual essential amino acids on the level of liver lipids, growing rats were fed diets consisting of an amino acid mixture in which the content of a particular amino acid was either 50% more or 50% less than that in the control diet. Feeding excessive amounts of individual essential amino acids did not affect food intake, body weight gain, feed efficiency or liver lipid content except when excessive amounts of methionine plus cystine were fed. Feeding excessive amounts of sulfur-containing amino acids caused an increase in liver lipids, but had no effect on the other parameters measured. The supplementation of threonine or lysine to the sulfur-containing amino acid excessive diet did not cause a decrease in the lipid level in liver. Increasing the concentration of tryptophan in the diet to 2% had no effect. Feeding threonine-deficient and lysine-deficient diets caused a significant rise in liver lipid content in spite of a lower food efficiency compared with control animals, while feeding phenylalanine plus tyrosine-deficient and sulfur-containing amino acid-deficient diets caused a reduction in both food efficiency and liver lipid content. Histidine deficiency caused a decrease in liver lipid content but had no effect on food efficiency. In a separate experiment, the reduction of sulfur-containing amino acids in threonine-deficient diet or lysine-deficient diet resulted in a significant decrease of liver lipid content. The feeding of a diet deficient in both threonine and sulfur-containing amino acids did not cause a change in either growth rate or food efficiency as compared with feeding a threonine-deficient diet. However, the feeding of a diet deficient in both lysine and sulfur-containing amino acids caused a reduction in both growth rate and food efficiency as compared with feeding a lysine-deficient diet.

KEY WORDS: • amino acid composition • liver lipid content

Manuscript received 24 January 1972.